By LEE JENKINS

Published: February 18, 2006

About 100 yards from the finish line, Lindsey Jacobellis hung in the air. She had only one jump remaining. Her closest competitor was about 50 yards behind.

American coaches were being congratulated. Family members were being mobbed. Jacobellis, 20, the face of several Olympic advertising campaigns and the favorite in the first Olympic women's snowboardcross race, was all but being crowned the fourth American snowboarder to win a gold medal. But if the snowboarders seemed immune to the difficulties that have befallen American athletes like the skier Bode Miller and the figure skater Johnny Weir in these Olympics, that notion came to a crashing end Friday.

Lucky Lindsey, as she used to be called, got in the way of her own victory ride. Like a basketball player going for a reverse dunk or a football player high-stepping toward the end zone, Jacobellis stylishly grabbed the back of her board in midair. She coolly angled it to the right. The move is called a Method. It may have to be renamed the Jacobellis.

At the height of her jump, Jacobellis said, she felt a stiff wind in her face and briefly lost her balance. She could barely control her legs, burning from the demands of the 3,000-foot course. She tasted blood from her mouth, which she attributed to exhaustion. She tumbled from the clouds and landed on the heel edge of her board, then fell hard against her backside. Spinning three times on the ground, with her blond pigtails dragging against the ice, she formed the saddest snow angel in the Alps.

Jacobellis bounced up just in time to watch Tanja Frieden of Switzerland fly past her to claim the gold medal. The snowboardcross, making its first appearance at the Olympics, had provided its first goat. Although Jacobellis collected the silver medal, her ride will be remembered for her fall. ''As a freestyler,'' Jacobellis said lightheartedly, ''I bow my head in shame.''

Asked to explain why she would choose to perform a needlessly risky aerial maneuver in such a crucial situation, Jacobellis, from Stratton, Vt., said: ''I just was trying to grab my board on the jump so I could stabilize myself. You're not trying to create style there. You're trying to create stability.'' She softened her case somewhat during a teleconference two hours later, acknowledging that she was possibly trying to have some fun and may not have made the best choice.

Jacobellis refused to paint herself as a showboat, but it was impossible to argue with the pictures on the big screen. After watching a video replay in the media center, the United States snowboardcross coach, Peter Foley, said: ''She definitely tweaked it a little harder than she needed to. If she saw it, she'd say, 'Oh yeah, that's a little much.' ''

Although snowboardcross, in which four riders race down the mountain at the same time, does not award style points, participants are still snowboarders, flamboyant and carefree, and they often punctuate victorious runs with fashionable jumps. Jacobellis, a top snowboardcross racer who is also a decorated halfpipe rider, went for the kind of move that captured gold for the American halfpipers Shaun White and Hannah Teter. Her timing, however, could not have been worse.

Late in the final heat, with Jacobellis leading, two of the other three racers had already crashed. The third, Frieden, was so far behind that she had lost sight of Jacobellis. ''I was just stoked to have silver,'' Frieden said.

Foley said that as he watched on television, he was screaming at the monitor: ''Keep racing! Keep racing!'' When coaches from other countries came up with premature handshakes for his assistant, Jeff Archibald, Archibald shouted, ''No!''

At the moment of the fall, the Jacobellis family appeared to go silent. Foley grabbed his face in agony. And Frieden, coming around a final turn, recalled yelling, ''Whoa!'' She quickly flashed back to an X Games race a couple of years ago when she was comfortably in the lead and came out of her crouch before the finish line. Jacobellis, crouching all the way, overcame her at the wire.

But the Olympics are not the X Games, and Jacobellis acknowledged that she was more nervous than usual heading into her last run. In the Visa commercial that stars Jacobellis, her coach tries to calm her nerves by telling her: ''You can do this. Don't look at them, look at me. Picture yourself alone on the mountain. Imagine yourself on the medal stand. No one can touch you.''

Foley, on the other hand, talked strategy atop the hill. He told Jacobellis to grab her board if she did not feel comfortable with a jump. Jacobellis said she was particularly uneasy about the second-to-last jump of the course.

It is curious, then, that Jacobellis would attempt a trick on the very jump that she was so worried about. ''Sometimes it's subconscious, but that was putting on a show,'' Seth Wescott, who won the men's snowboardcross Thursday, told The Associated Press.

Wescott stood at the bottom of the mountain, wearing his gold medal, as Jacobellis walked away with her head bowed and her shoulders slumped. Jacobellis is Wescott's teammate. But Frieden is his girlfriend. His loyalties were divided.

Conflicts and crashes have come to define the Olympic debut of the snowboardcross. In the final race, Canada's Dominique Maltais careered through a side net and her fellow Canadian Maelle Ricker fell so violently that she had to be taken by helicopter to a trauma center in Turin. But Maltais improbably came back to win the bronze medal and Ricker was released from the hospital Friday night.

While Jacobellis will inevitably be criticized, Foley made the point that performing is as important to snowboarders as winning. Despite all the medals and endorsement deals, snowboarding remains a sport founded on radical risk and a sense of spontaneity.

''If she got caught up in the moment, what are you going to do?'' Foley said. ''And if people think that's a big deal, they still miss the point of snowboarding.''

Photos: The American snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis going airborne on the second-to-last jump yesterday in Italy. She fell on her landing, was passed, and took the silver. (Photo by John G. Mabanglo/European Pressphoto Agency)(pg. D3); Lindsey Jacobellis, leading the snowboardcross, fell on a jump about 100 yards from the finish line. (Photo by Joe Klamar/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images)(pg. A1)